A web site is a group of related web pages that are available for retrieval via the Internet or another computer network. Parties that maintain web sites are sometimes called “publishers.” Some publishers sell to advertisers opportunities to include advertising messages on their web sites. For example, the publisher of a news web site may sell to an advertiser selling residential inspection services an opportunity to include advertisements on the publishers web site.
In particular, publishers often sell opportunities to include advertising on particular pages of publishers' web sites having special significance. For example, because residential inspection services may be valuable to people who are in the market for a house, the publisher of the news web site may sell to the residential inspection services advertiser an opportunity to include advertisements on pages of the publishers web site containing articles about real estate sales. As another example, the publisher may sell to the residential inspection services advertiser an opportunity to include advertisements on search result pages produced from user queries containing the search term “home sales.”
Because some pages on a web site have more advertising significance than others, advertiser demand to include advertising messages on a particular web site may vary widely from one page of the web site to another. This is disadvantageous in several respects. First, more significant pages are oversubscribed, in that some advertisers that want to advertise there are unable to do so. Advertisers may have to forego receiving advertising revenue from advertisers that would have advertised on these pages if they were not oversubscribed. Second, less significant pages are undersubscribed, in that there are not enough advertisers that want to advertise on these pages to purchase all of the available advertising capacity there. In the case of these pages, the publisher either must sometimes serve the page without any advertising, generating no incremental advertising revenue, or must accept location-insensitive messages at a very low price.
Another disadvantage of this approach is that, while the fact that a particular user has requested retrieval of a page relating to a particular subject may in some cases accurately predict that the user will be interested in advertising related to a similar subject, the user often has no such interest. Accordingly, presenting advertising in this manner often has a fairly low level of effectiveness.
In view of the above-discussed disadvantage of conventional approaches to web advertising, a new approach that overcame these disadvantages would have significant utility.